There are several ways triggering the Turkish Competition
Authority ("TCA") to open an inquiry.
The procedure may begin as a result of the TCA receiving a
complaint, a leniency application or otherwise being notified of an
alleged violation, or the TCA acting on its own initiative to open
an inquiry. The TCA can do this in two ways - it can
technically either open a preliminary investigation or a
full-fledge investigation (while the former usually takes one to
two months, the latter takes six months to one year).
In practice, however, the TCA generally first initiates a
preliminary investigation rather than a full-fledged investigation
so that it can assess whether a full-fledged investigation would at
all be necessary. This is primarily because an investigation
requires greater amount of time and resource, both of the
investigated firms and the TCA. If, at the end of the preliminary
investigation term, the TCA finds that the practices are not
anti-competitive, it
